This is a slightly updated repeat of a column I wrote last year for New Year’s Eve. We are off gallivanting around, and will be back in the new year, full of new resolves and recipes. Happy New Year, Gentle Readers!

This New Year’s Eve I am kicking back with gin and Champagne (probably Prosecco because we are starting a New Year’s Resolution Budget). We will fire up the Acorn TV and watch a couple of episodes of the original Upstairs, Downstairs. There is nothing that makes me feel like a schlubby, self-indulgent, middle-aged, middle-class American faster than Upstairs, Downstairs.

Prosecco or Champagne? It’s a personal choice. I am hugely impressed by a stately bottle of Veuve Cliquot, and would probably serve it to Mr. Hudson, the butler from Upstairs, Downstairs, if he ever came to call. But I find a pretty orange label on a bottle of Mionetto Prosecco just as appealing. Lady Marjorie, also from 165 Eaton Place, would never comment on the lower price point. She would be pleased just to loosen her corset stays and have a second glass. And then Lady Marjorie will tell me to relax, and to enjoy myself a little bit. “You never know when disaster will strike,” she confides. (Lady Marjorie went down on Titanic, so she has some experience with life changing moments.)

Mr. Hudson would tell me to pull up my bootstraps. The Christmas cookies are almost gone. In the meantime, it is Friday night, and it has been a long week. It’s the last time to indulge in 2018. Instead pouring a glass of my usual cheap winter Malbec, I thought I should test some seasonal, perhaps New Year’s Eve-ish cocktail recipes, to get back into the holiday spirit. These are crowd pleasers, but they require a little planning.

“The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love is like being enlivened with Champagne.”
– Samuel Johnson

French 75s

“Hits with remarkable precision.”
-Harry Craddock, The Savoy Cocktail Book

2 ounces gin
1 ounce lemon juice
1 spoonful extra fine sugar
Champagne

Shake the gin, lemon juice and sugar in a cocktail shaker filled with cracked ice until chilled and well-mixed and then pour into tall glass containing cracked ice and fill up the glass with Champagne. This clever cocktail was said to have been devised during WWI, the kick from the alcohol combo being described as powerful as the French 75mm howitzer gun.

“Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of Champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.”
-Winston Churchill

Champagne Cocktail

In a Champagne glass add a teaspoon of sugar and enough Angostura bitters to melt the sugar. Add a tablespoon of Grand Marnier or cognac and mix in with the sugar, bitters mix. Add a “fine” quality Champagne and stir. Float a slice of thin orange on top. This is what Ilsa and Victor Laszlo sipped in Casablanca.

“Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.”
-Mark Twain

As always, our festive friends at Food52 have some delightful ideas for nibbles to help soak up some of the bubbly we are sure to be drinking on New Year’s Eve. http://www.food52.com/blog/2807

On a recent trip to food-forward-thinking-Charleston, friends ordered the Aperol and Prosecco cocktail, because they are oh, so trendy. I did not realize that this is the most popular cocktail in Italy. And now it can be one of yours, too!

Aperol and Prosecco

3 parts chilled, dry Prosecco
2 parts Aperol
1 splash soda

Serve with on the rocks in wine glass or rocks glass
Garnish with a slice of orange (this makes it practically health food!)
http://www.eater.com/2014/10/21/7020183/the-story-of-the-aperol-spritz-a-classic-italian-cocktail

This is very pretty, and so seasonal: pomegranate mimosas. Yumsters. http://www.delish.com/cooking/recipe-ideas/recipes/a46968/pomegranate-mimosas-recipe/

“My only regret in life is that I didn’t drink enough Champagne”
-John Maynard Keynes

And the best of both worlds: a Black Velvet! Champagne and Guinness. This drink is simply equal parts stout and sparkling wine, and to be honest, there are some who will never understand its appeal. But to fans, this is a perfect special-occasion drink, particularly suited to mornings and late afternoons. I had my first on a gelid night in London, at Rules, in Covent Garden. Divine.

Black Velvet

4 ounces (1/2 cup) chilled Champagne or Prosecco
4 ounces (1/2 cup) chilled Guinness Extra Stout

Pour the Champagne into a tall glass. We first had ours served in heavy pewter tankards, but at home we eschew the delicate flutes for a sturdy rocks glass. This is not an effete drink. It is robust, and fills your hand with determination. Be sure to pour the Guinness on top. (This is important: Guinness is heavier. If you pour the sparkling wine second, it won’t combine evenly, and will need to be stirred. I shudder at the thought!)

Enjoy yourself this weekend. Happy New Year! Loosen those corset strings. And let the games begin, again, on Wednesday.

“Why do I drink Champagne for breakfast? Doesn’t everyone?”
-Noel Coward

’Tis the season to be jolly, and generous, and thoughtful, and creative. While being mindful of your budget, and considering other people’s delicate sensibilities and constitutions. I will refer you to your local independent bookstore where recommendations will be helpful and insightful.

When we renovated this house we added two walls of built-in bookcases, one in the living room and one in the kitchen, because we live with books. I come from a family of readers and writers and book lovers. This week’s illustration is one of four shelves devoted to our cookbooks. Sometimes the books are grouped thematically – Jamie Oliver’s stands next to The River Café Cook Book because he got his start working at the River Café. Mark Bittman and Amanda Hesser bookend the shelf because of their New York Times connection. The well-thumbed Lee Bailey’s Country Desserts falls open to favorite, oft-baked Flourless Chocolate Cake. I still refer to the book, even though I bake a flourless chocolate cake a couple of times a year, and have done so every year since 1985.

Using the internets for finding recipes is convenient, but hardly as evocative as the grease-flecked pages of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which is on another shelf, just out of the frame above. I don’t have recipe cards tucked into my own mother’s old copy of Google. I can’t dog ear or underline important directions that I overlook when I am in a hurry. Sometimes it is important to mix all the dry ingredients together FIRST. Or that an egg should be beaten before adding it to the mixture. I tend to be hasty in the kitchen, and do better with a paper version of the dish I am trying to produce than with a webpage that needs to be refreshed every few minutes. One of these days I will memorize Mark Bittman’s easy peasy pizza dough recipe, since I whip up a batch almost every week, so it is a signal that the weekend is about to begin when I get his book off the shelf on a Friday morning, and it opens to the very spot I seek.

And thus the holiday theme for this week’s Food Friday. Gift giving. Not gifting. What a terrible word! Please promise me that you will give book gifts.

You can start with the newest edition of Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. The Basic Pizza Dough recipe can be found in my edition of the book on page 178. This is a wonderful book to give to youngsters just starting out – or to have as a handy dandy reference, or to give to someone who does not subscribe to The New York Times. I have the tenth anniversary edition – but a new and improved 20th anniversary edition is now in print. (Mr. Friday found this copy on a remainder table! Always a bargain hunter, our Mr. Friday.) https://www.markbittman.com/books

Vivian Howard’s Deep Run Roots is a beautifully designed book. She must have developed high production values when doing her PBS show A Chef’s Life. Her recipes are just as charming and quirky as the program. We cooked Scarlett’s Chicken Rice a couple of weeks ago, and froze several containers to have for winter weather insurance. https://www.vivianhoward.com/deep-run-roots

Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table was a revelation! I had always thought she was a baker. I hadn’t realized her versatility until a friend cooked the most impressive Chicken in a Pot for us. Amazing. It introduced us to another portal in the universe that leads to garlic and preserved lemons. And the fact that a screwdriver is a key cooking utensil lends the dish a certain bit of je ne sais quoi. For sure. https://doriegreenspan.com/book/around-my-french-table-more-than-300-recipes-from-my-home-to-yours-5/

While not a cook book, this new book is rather charming memoir by New York Magazine restaurant writer Adam Platt. It was a throughly enjoyable bit of armchair travel and fine dining: The Book of Eating. I always read his reviews in New York, not that I will ever dine in any of the eateries he reviews, but it feels as if the opportunity ever presents itself, I will be au currant and prepared for discussions about farm-to-table, fois gras, New Age crabmeat pithivier, or even “elegantly sliced hamachi crudo.” Here is an excerpt: http://www.grubstreet.com/2019/10/in-defense-of-wasp-cooking.html

Speaking of charming – this is a British podcast that I have been enjoying while walking Luke the wonder dog: Table Manners. Jessie Ware and her mother Lenny cook warmly satisfying meals for a panoply of talented guests, while discussing creative projects, books, movies, food, travel, Uber ratings, and final meals in a fairly ribald manner. (Spoiler alert – F bombs are dropped, but with cute British accents.) https://play.acast.com/s/tablemanners

I hope you will stroll into your local bookshop and will rummage through the cookbooks for all your nearest and dearest this festive season. Holiday meals can be minefields: it is good to have protective armor and reference books. No screens at the table, please. And another key to easing your holiday burdens – books are easily wrapped. Plus, one size fits all – you can always squeeze one more book onto a shelf.

Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and happy holidays!

“This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook — try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!”
-Julia Child

It’s Friday the thirteenth, in December, and I haven’t quite recovered from Thanksgiving yet. I am still finding stray Legos in odd places, and I just threw away a baggie brimming with some gelatinous remnant of endive. Boxes of Christmas decorations litter the guest room floor because we still haven’t gotten around to buying a tree, let alone decorating it. I am just a little disorganized and frazzled. I could use a good cocktail party.

I require no witty banter. I don’t like fancy cocktail parties that call for panty hose and intricate finger food. Who really needs toast points, coated with egg, with a dab of caviar? Manicure? Me? Preposterous! I like the kind of gatherings where everyone has thrown out their vegan-keto-intermittent-fasting mentality, and we are all grouped around a bowl of Knorr’s (or Lipton’s) onion soup dip, shoveling and excavating with Ruffles. Yumsters. Who has time to be precious with puff pastry? Bring on the chip and dips. And throw in some nuts and Cheetos, please.

The Disappearing Act

This evolved from your basic 1950s onion dip for what I imagined to be John Cheever-y kinds of cocktail parties. I think it is a step up the slippery evolutionary kitchen slope because I use Knorr soup mix, which sounds imported, no? Regardless of the shopworn cliché and conceit, this dip is very popular with our guests, whether they be guzzling the French 75s or clinking their icy bottles of Coke.

Makes 2 cups
2 cups sour cream
1 package Knorr’s onion soup mix
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon fresh thyme, finely chopped
2 tablespoons green onion, finely chopped
Mix all the ingredients together and chill until it’s time to serve. Excellent with veggies, but much better with big fat crunchy kettle fried chips.

If you would like to bypass all the sodium and preservatives in the store-bought mix version, and you have a time to fuss, you can make this Alison Roman version from the New York Times. They say the prep time is about an hour and fifteen minutes:

Sour Cream and Onion Dip
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 pound yellow onions (about 3 medium), thinly sliced
2 shallots, thinly sliced
Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper
1 cup sour cream
1 cup full fat Greek yogurt or sour cream
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 clove garlic, finely grated
Olive oil, for drizzling
¼ cup finely chopped chives

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat.
Add onions and shallots and season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onions are softened and starting to turn a nice golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes. Reduce heat to low and continue to cook, stirring often to make sure the onions don’t stick along the bottom of the skillet. Cook until onions are a deep golden brown and reduced by about half their original size, another 45 to 55 minutes. Resist the urge to turn up the heat to make them caramelize faster. It will lead to burning.
Transfer onions and shallots to a cutting board and finely chop. Place in a large bowl along with sour cream, yogurt, lemon juice and garlic. Season with salt and pepper.
Transfer to a serving bowl and drizzle with olive oil, season with pepper and sprinkle with chives.
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1019040-sour-cream-and-onion-dip?

For once, Martha has an easier way. A little compromise, although you do have to cook a lot of bacon.
Loaded Baked-Potato Dip https://www.marthastewart.com/1535444/loaded-baked-potato-dip

With this dream recipe you can forgo the dip. Think of the time you can save!
Garlic Parmesan Potato Chips

I tried it out on the neighbors last year at our little New Year’s Eve fête, and it was hoovered up in record time.

1 12-ounce bag of potato chips (the store brand is the best value!)
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
3 tablespoons dried parsley flakes.
3 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
4 cloves garlic
In a small sauce pan, or frying pan, warm the 3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. Add the 4 cloves of garlic-pressed garlic. Cook at a low heat for 3 minutes, until fragrant. There is nothing like garlic to make the house smell homey and divine. Let the oil cool for about 5 or 10 minutes.
Put the chips in a large, shallow bowl. Drizzle with the garlic-infused oil. Toss the chips, gently. There is nothing worse than tiny little mingey bits of chips when one is trying to impress… Add the parsley and half the Parmesan cheese.
Warm the oven to 350°F degrees.
Put the chips on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Warm in the oven for about 7 or 8 minutes. Put the chips back in the original shallow bowl, scatter in the rest of the cheese, and toss. Serve warm. Yumsters.

How about stepping up your hummus game, and making it from scratch, too? There is nothing wrong with buying hummus, and serving it straight from the container, but if you are having a little soirée, wouldn’t it be nice to be smug, and swan around knowing you are serving homemade hummus? That is something you will never see in a Hallmark Christmas movie. Don’t forget the pita.

Homemade Humble-bragging Hummus

1 garlic clove
Juice of 1 lemon, about 1/4 cup
3 heaping tablespoons of tahini
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/3 cup of olive oil
2 (15-ounce) cans chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1 pinch of cayenne pepper

Drop the garlic clove into a food processor and add the lemon juice. Add the tahini on top and the salt and cumin. Process until the mixture looks peanut-buttery, about 1 minute. Stream in the olive oil, a little at a time, with the motor running. Process just until the mixture is smooth and creamy. Add the chickpeas and process for about 3 minutes, scraping the sides of the bowl as you go, until the chickpeas are completely blended and the hummus is smooth and uniform in color.

Go out into the back yard and looks for greens and pinecones. I added some holly sprigs to a big, shallow bowl of whole, fresh cranberries with a fat white pillar candle to be our holiday centerpiece. You can get creative with citrus fruit and even a pineapple, depending on your need to strive. Chill some Prosecco, warm up some mulled wine, have some holiday cheer ready for your dear friends, who want come in from the cold.

“After all, what is your host’s purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they’d have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.”
-P. J. O’Rourke

“Without peanuts, it isn’t a cocktail party.”
-Julia Child

After a joyous and fattening Thanksgiving I have waddled back into the kitchen to confront the next round of holidays which are headed toward us at an alarming pace. Our neighbors seemed to have put up their Christmas lights while still gnawing on turkey legs. I have not been quite so swift, but I have purchased a pungent evergreen wreath from a local civic group, decorated it with sprigs of holly and some spangly gold star ribbon, and hung it on the front door. I have also moved the unsightly, out-of-season-overnight mums to the back yard where I will transplant them if the weather cooperates this weekend.

Looking at the calendar is sobering. Hanukkah starts on the twenty-second, and Christmas arrives just three days later. I’ve got to start thinking about the annual rite of cookie baking. It seems early to contemplate holiday baking – especially when I am still eating leftover Thanksgiving turkey for lunch every day. But there is no denying facts; in three weeks we will be wondering how the time flew by so fast.

I am thinking about the cookies I need to mail to our far-flung friends and family, and even more to take around to the neighbors, not to mention those for personal consumption. I like to send cookies that will evoke memories, like Proust’s madeleines. Just before Thanksgiving I sent my brother a box of home-baked gingersnaps, which remind us of our mother. Store-bought gingersnaps are never as poignant, or as crisp and deelish. He said he sat down, poured a big glass of cold milk, and immediately scarfed down three cookies. When was the last time that you ate three cookies without guilt? Childhood, when calories were never considered. And as long as Mom kept pulling sheets of warm cookies out of the oven on cold winter afternoons, we would continue eating gingersnaps. Not delicate little ladylike nibbles. Full-throated, passionate chomps of warm molasses-infused, sugar-crusted, pliant discs of deliciousness. Dinosaur-sized bites. Yumsters.

Baltimore has its own Proustian trigger: the Berger cookie. I have included links to several recipes and histories of the Berger cookie. You need to work out the size and heft and the proportions for yourself, but I don’t care for the bitsy Oreo-sized versions. I am baking English muffin-sized Bergers. They will be epic and Brobdingnagian. The ratio of chocolate frosting to the cake-like cookie will be impressive. These are cookies we ate when we were college students. When a whole row of Oreos could be consumed in one sitting. When we laughed at calories. It is the time of the year to revisit our misspent youth.

So it that spirit – use the heavy cream, and not sour cream. Eschew the corn syrup. Layer on the chocolate, accept your plangent wisps of nostalgia, and bake some new, giddy memories. (And do not cheat and buy Bergers from Amazon. You have to have some standards!)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-berger-cookie-is-baltimores-gift-to-the-chocolate-world-6918029/

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/berger-cookie-baltimore-health-regulations

https://sweetlittlebluebird.com/copycat-recipe-baltimores-famous-berger_20/

https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/copycat-berger-cookies/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2019/12/02/if-a-brownie-and-a-sugar-cookie-had-a-baby-it-would-be-this-berger-cookie/

https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/baltimore-berger-cookies-recipe

Peppermint variation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/chocolate-peppermint-cookies/10391/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/19/proust-madeleine-cakes-started-as-toast-in-search-of-lost-time-manuscripts-reveal

“I cannot go any further without mentioning my favourite biscuit of all time, now sadly, tragically, extinct. The oaty, crumbly, demerara notes of the long-forgotten Abbey Crunch will remain forever on my lips. I loved the biscuit as much as anything I have ever eaten, and often, in moments of solitude, I still think about its warm, buttery, sugary self.”
― Nigel Slater

Cooking with duck fat is a new concept for me. Call me a convert. In my quest for the most perfect and delicious, hot and crunchy potato dishes I have tried corn oil, vegetable oil, olive oil, peanut oil and bacon fat. I have finally discovered magic in a bottle. (Actually, magic in a jar, delivered courtesy of Amazon, but that is a superfluous detail.) With the Waterfowl Festival taking off this weekend in Easton, now seems like a good time to extoll the wizardry that is duck fat.

The other night I parboiled a peeled Russet potato, which I had cut into wedges. Once they were fork-tender, I drained them in a colander, and patted them dry with paper towels. In the large and heavy cast-iron skillet I melted two tablespoons of duck fat that I had scooped from a glass jar that the UPS guy had delivered that afternoon, in the dark, at 5:30 PM. (It is going to take us all a long time to get used to the clock change, we agreed.)

The fat melted quickly at a lower medium heat, and bubbled and began to fill the kitchen with an enchanted aroma. I dumped the potato wedges into the sizzle, and stood expectantly, watching the transformation begin. I turned the wedges carefully, after I saw the bottom edges turning golden sienna. And after a few more minutes of delicate and obsessive fussing, I scooped the potato wedges out of the fat, and onto another paper towel. A mere dusting of Maldon salt was the only seasoning. And I spooned the perfectly golden brown wedges onto the dinner plates alongside the sausages, peppers, onions and garlic bread. (There was a green salad already on the table as well as a couple of glasses of an inexpensive Cabernet.)

The duck-fried potato wedges were divinely light and crunchy, and absolutely deelish. And best of all, they stayed warm through the meal. They were the soothssayingly crisp foil to the soft and slick peppers and onions. They were magical fried potatoes. Not from a freezer bag, or a store, or a fast-food drive-through. They weren’t doused in chemical preservatives. They were adult fries, with spell-binding panache. (Though no truffles.) Go get some duck fat. Right now.

Through my extensive research into the perfect homemade fried potatoes I have experienced many failures, but I think using duck fat is going to ratchet up my game considerably. There is much pleasure to be derived from homemade culinary triumphs; simple pleasures are indeed the best.

This was the impetus for my duck fat experiment: https://www.myrecipes.com/extracrispy/how-to-cook-with-duck-fat which might give you more practical information than my anecdotal paean.

And because fries are delicious, and necessary for a fulfilled life, but aren’t very photographic, I tried them again for breakfast this morning, topped with beauteous eggs for this week’s illustration. Mr. Friday drove away with a smile on his face. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee3hWLMUvD8

Waterfowl Festival goers: you probably know how to do this already, but here is a short video about conjuring up your own duck fat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkWeKp-Elvw

You’ll have more time on the weekend for frying up bacon and tomatoes, and here is an impressive breakfast to prepare before a weekend filled with retriever demonstrations, waterfowl calling, diving dogs, decoy appreciation and beer tasting: https://www.food24.com/Recipes/duck-fat-egg-toastie-20170612

“It is easy to think of potatoes, and fortunately for men who have not much money it is easy to think of them with a certain safety. Potatoes are one of the last things to disappear, in times of war, which is probably why they should not be forgotten in times of peace.”
― M.F.K. Fisher

For all things Waterfowl Festival 2019: https://www.waterfowlfestival.org/